Beyond Event Tracking: How to Insert Dynamic Content in Your Emails

For all the talk of personalization in email marketing, there’s little discussion about dynamic content. Marketers have been inserting basic customer metadata – names, ages, cities, etc. – for years, but that’s personalization 101. It’s time to turn it up a notch.

We’ve spent the last three years building tools to help you insert new kinds of dynamic data into your emails. Tracking on-site and in-app activity is just the beginning. Once the data is tracked – think product views, feature usage, inactivity – you can actually insert content based on user behavior. You can, for example, send reminders based on products viewed or suggest new products to regular customers.

In the past, this would have required massaging your data with SQL and multiple CSV exports/imports. But now, you can insert literally any of your data into emails from a single interface. That includes the basics, like user names and roles, but also product images, inventory, links and so much more.

Dynamic content has arrived. Soon, static content will be the exception, replaced by APIs sending in the best possible content as your emails hit the inbox. In this post, we’ll explain the tiers of content personalization and how to achieve each.

Tiers of Personalized Email Content

Making an email great for a user to receive translates into something great for you. So what makes an email great?

Great for the customer

What it means for you

Solving a problem

Conversions

Sharing interesting/valuable information

Engagement

Making the recipient smile

Retention

Personalized content is essential in order to provide contextual content that triggers the human emotions required to click, read, subscribe and buy. But too much email content is one-dimensional. Typing an article or sales copy into an HTML template and clicking “Send” has become the unfortunate norm.

Level 0: Segments and Static Content

Subscribing to a newsletter is a broad form of personalization. When someone subscribes, they are essentially segmenting themselves according to interest. If the content is as interesting as expected, your emails should have high engagement. We’re referring to this as Level 0 because it’s the baseline for any good campaign.

The BuzzFeed Animals newsletter is a perfect example. They tell you the segment you are entering before you sign-up. As an added bonus, they also tell you when to expect it. (Context for the win!) This might seem cheeky but it’s actually brilliant. It’s impossible for the wrong people end up on this list. This isn’t advanced but it is highly effective. Done well, it can help you build trusting relationships with your users.

Level 1: Insert Basic Customer Merge Tags

You’ve definitely received emails with your name in the subject line – as email marketers, we all know that merge tags at work. Merge tags are placeholders that are replaced by actual content when the email is sent.

Hey {{user.name}}!

…becomes…

“Hey Jimmy!”

This data is primarily collected on signup and stored in your email service provider’s database. Like Level 0, it’s not advanced but it’s a step closer to one-to-one email marketing.

Level 2: Collect and Insert On-Site Data

At Vero, we use the Liquid Templating language to handle merge tags. This is a powerful tool for merge tags that allows you to do equations, create if blocks and loop through data.

We track two things that can be used in Liquid: users and events. Each of these can have all kinds of attached properties – timestamps, URL strings, product data, etc. – that can also be used for personalization. If a user or event is a noun, properties are the adjectives that describe them.

Using our API, you can track any events you like with any properties you like in real-time as users browse your site, app or store. Here are a few typical event properties you can only capture in this way:

Products in cart (array)

Creation of a project or other item in your SaaS app and their details

Product views, including their categories

Password resets and the temporary token that powers that reset

Abandoned cart emails are a good example of using this on-site activity. An event is tracked – Viewed Cart – with an event attribute that is an array of all the items in their cart – including, for example, a 6″ Service Boot. You can use the event to trigger the email – Send after 24 hours of inactivity – and use the event attribute to populate the product field. You can even use the product image (another event property) in the email.

You can push all kinds of data into Vero for future personalization. Here are two more examples:

Tag your content based on its primary goal, then push the data into Vero. For example, we tag each post with a target job (acquisition, nurture, retention) and target persona (B2C, B2B, e-commerce, marketing), then push the data into Vero. From there, we can create segments based on each readers’ industry and place in the customer lifecycle.

Track events in-app, then trigger emails with event properties. Imagine you’re Twitter and you want people to tweet more. You can track an event when users start a tweet and another when then send it. When a user takes the first behavior without the second, you can trigger an email reminder that includes the text of the tweet.

By pushing data into Vero, you keep one central record for each user which can be used to segment users and personalize emails. This is fairly sophisticated, but there’s still another level of personalization.

Level 3: Pull Data From Your Own Database

There are situations where the data you want to insert into an email changes in the period since it was tracked, or is not available in real-time as the customer browses your site.

That’s where Level 3 comes in, and it’s a game-changer. By connecting external APIs to Vero, you can take email personalization to a new level. To explain how it works, I’ll use a real customer example.

Uniplaces is a marketplace for students to book accommodations and for landlords to find tenants. When users sign up and begin searching for a house or apartment, Uniplaces tracks events and event properties that allow them to send impressive email campaigns.

When a logged-in user views a listing, they record an event – Views listing – and an event property – event.city. If the user fails to complete the next event – Completes booking – Uniplaces sends an email with suggested listings.

Here’s a sample of that email:

The four links to suggested apartments in the user’s target city are inserted dynamically. Uniplaces only has to create this email once. Then, regardless of the city, the email will be personalized with relevant listings. One event, one template, one campaign and one database of suggested listings.

There’s obviously some wizardry going on behind the scenes, but it’s not overly complex. In this case, the first step is creating an API endpoint to load the suggested listings. This data lives outside of Vero, but can be inserted via Liquid in the campaign creator. The “External Attributes” field connects any outside data to your emails.

Each item is an array that can be inserted when the user attribute matches the target city. For example, if the user attribute is user.Porto, Vero pulls the Porto array into the email. (This code is just a sample of the many cities in the array.)

When the email is sent, Vero filters through the API endpoint to match the right content to each individual user. Pairing existing metadata with targeted content creates an email experience that is more relevant and useful to your users.

This:

Becomes this:

The Future

With some data and a little setup, you can easily create an email experience that far exceeds your users’ expectations. Most businesses already have all the data they need. If you have any questions about dynamic content, just drop a note in the comments or email us at support@getvero.com. We’re also happy to help you brainstorm ways to use your existing data and explain other advanced campaigns.

The future of content is here. Give your users the email experience they deserve.

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Mario Kyriacou

Great post, would be really cool to see how conversions
improve once you’ve reached level 3.

I know links can be annoying or unprofessional in emails, but why not encourage clients to watch something entertaining and something that communicates your brand through a web-series or promo video. Lexicon Studios is driving the forefront of this new media technique.

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